School's Out
by everyonelovesagoodBhloe
Summary: Just an AU where Chloe and Beca spend the summer after Beca's sophomore year at the redhead's family house in Miami.


"Wake up!" An exuberant and overly cheerful Chloe Beale yelled, as she entered her best friend's room.

A groan emanated from the bed, as Chloe plopped herself next to the partially awakened person still under the sheets.

"What the hell, Chloe?" Beca Mitchell hissed, as she tried, without success, to pull her blanket over her face and crawl back into a peaceful sleep.

Chloe couldn't help but laugh at her friend. The DJ was not a morning person by any stretch of the imagination and it never ceased to amuse the redhead.

Chloe poked the girl's side. "I've got coffee," she tried to bribe Beca in a melodic voice.

"It's way too early," Beca whined as she tried one last time to prolong her tranquil slumber.

"Didn't your dad ever tell you that the early bird gets the worm? 6 am is not too early," Chloe laughed.

"That sounds like real good advice, Chloe," Beca sarcastically replied. "If I was a damn bird."

Chloe sighed. Beca was being especially difficult this morning, and the redhead debated how to wake the smaller girl up. They needed to get their day started so that they could get going on their trip to Chloe's parent's house. After a few seconds, a mischievous grin washed over the ginger's face.

"I know what'll wake you up," she gleefully exclaimed to herself.

The snarky girl was one of the most ticklish people that Chloe had ever known, and thanks to living together with Beca at the Bella house, coupled with her complete and utter disregard for personal boundaries, she knew **exactly** which spots to attack on the brunette's delicate body. This would be more than worth the snarl she would earn from the sleeping girl.

Chloe moved from her spot beside Beca and gently straddled her, being extra cautious to ensure that her friend didn't suspect what was about to happen. Chloe subconsciously licked her lips as she admired the situation she was currently in. It had been a recurring dream of hers that she would be atop of Beca, not that she would ever tell anyone about her true feelings for her. No-one, with the exception of Bree, knew that she was in love with her best friend, and that had only happened after finishing a bottle of vodka one night at an acapella party, after she had had the misfortune of witnessing Beca's, then boyfriend, lead the two of them upstairs towards his room.

Chloe shoved her thoughts aside and returned her focus to the scene in front of her. She was on top of Beca Mitchell. Beca Mitchell was asleep. Beca Mitchell needed to be woken up or they wouldn't get to their destination before two in the morning.

"Final warning, Mitchell. Are you sure you don't want to wake up willingly?"

"Go away," Beca groaned.

And that was all Chloe needed to hear. Her hands instantly darted to Beca's sides and she couldn't help but break out in a smile as the girl underneath her shot her eyes wide open and struggled to break free.

"I tried to warn you," Chloe winked, as her hands snaked from the top of Beca's rib cage down towards her hips, leaving a torturous wake of tickles in it's path.

As she hit a particularly sensitive spot on Beca's body, a loud and wild shriek could be heard throughout the entire Bella house and probably as far down as the end of the block.

"I will end you, Beale!" Beca screamed, as she desperately tried to slip out from under Chloe.

Chloe simply stuck her tongue out at the younger girl and continued to tickle her.

"You love me too much to lay a finger on me," she spiritedly asserted.

"Love, my ass. You're evil!" Beca barked, as she continued to try and find protection from the assault to her body

"Wake up then, grumpy," Chloe teased. A few seconds later, she heard Beca let out a huge huff, and as she stared into those dark blue eyes that had gradually become her favorite, Chloe knew that Beca was awake now. The redhead grinned as she carefully got off of the girl.

Mission complete.

"Where's this coffee you spoke of?" Beca glared at the person sitting next to her. This only made Chloe smile even brighter, and it took all of Beca's strength to not smile back. Chloe's happiness was contagious and her smile could light up a city.

"Love ya too, Becs."

Seconds later, a tray was on the DJ's lap, and Beca looked up at her friend with a curious expression. "You made me breakfast in bed?"

Chloe nodded. "I figured between coffee and offering the house hobbit some real food, I could persuade you to wake up before noon," she shrugged and took a sip of Beca's coffee, before putting it back. This earned her a playful slap,which Chloe accepted gladly accepted with giggles.

"First of all, I'm not a hobbit," Beca muttered, with a pout that Chloe couldn't help but adore. "Secondly, I haven't slept in until noon in weeks. Cut me some slack here, asshole."

"Someone's feisty this morning. Fine, you're not a hobbit," Chloe corrected, taking the opportunity to pick on Beca even further. "You're more like…a gremlin. You should really come with instructions, Becky."

Beca cringed at the name. Nearly two years after starting at the local radio station on campus and Luke, the station manager, still couldn't manage to get her name right. One night during sophomore year, Chloe had found herself inside of the station waiting for Beca to wrap up her shift. The redhead broke out in a fit of laughter when she heard the Englishman mispronounce her friend's name. After that moment, Chloe never hesitated to tease her with it whenever she was being "difficult."

Beca sighed as she tried not to give into the redhead's button pressing. Since freshman year, Chloe had brilliantly mastered the art of what made Beca tick and she somehow always knew how to make the girl do anything she wanted.

"This looks delicious," Beca changed the subject, studying the food that Chloe had gone out of her way to make for her. An omelette, half a dozen pieces of bacon, and an English muffin loaded with way too much butter; her favorite breakfast dish.

"It's only fair. Have I thanked you yet today, for agreeing to spend the summer with me and my family? It's totes cool of you, Becs. I don't think I could stand 6 weeks of interrogation–" Chloe's tone switched to a mocking one, as she mimicked the predictable questions, " _Why did you fail Russian Literature, again? When are you going to grow up and venture into the real world? When will you decide to stop obsessing over the Drellas? What do you mean you don't have a boyfriend? You're gonna be thirty before you know it;when can we expect grandchildren?_ "

Beca's brow furrowed,"The Drellas?"

The glimmer in Chloe's eyes vanished at once, her smile along with it.

"My mom," she began to explain. "We aren't exactly close, and she doesn't approve of most of the things I do. She thinks that I'm wasting my time with the Bellas. Oh, excuse me, I mean the _Drellas_. She'd rather that I be focusing on 'serious things that will set me up for my future outside of Barden'."

This was the first time that Chloe had ever volunteered to share information about her mom, and Beca was beginning to see why. Beca's eyes darted to the sheets. She sighed as she realized she was lost for words and desperate to buy even a moment to think about what to say. At least she knew a thing or two about distant parents. Even if her dad was doing everything in his power, at an annoying rate, to try and repair their relationship.

"Do you, like, I don't know, want to talk about it?" Beca tried, poorly, to comfort her friend.

There was a slight pause, before an unusually weak Chloe nodded.

"We used to be best friends, thick as thieves," she chuckled, and an old memory of her and her mom running and giggling all the way through the backyard of their Florida house, while playing catch, flashed through her mind. The memory had aged and rusted, now covered by a hardened shell of melancholy, and the redhead sighed as she desperately tried to remember her own mother's laugh.

"What changed?" Beca broke her concentration, and Chloe slipped back into the bittersweet real world.

"High school," Chloe answered, in a scarily distant and foreign voice, that even Beca could pick up on.

"What happened?" Beca asked as she intertwined her fingers with Chloe's and gave her hand a gentle and loving squeeze.

Chloe looked at her and smiled once more.

"During sophomore year, my mom cheated on my dad. I caught her with one of our neighbors when I came home from school early one afternoon."

"Oh," Beca replied. She scolded herself a moment later, when she was painfully reminded of how horrible she was at this whole friendship thing.

Chloe could always read Beca like an open book, and she couldn't help but admire how cute the girl looked when she was frustrated with herself. It wasn't her fault that she didn't know what to say when your mom cheats on your father and you wind up walking in on it. There were no magic words, or enough therapy sessions, to erase the mental image of your childhood cracking.

"She begged me not to tell dad. Even went as far as to bribe me with a car for my sixteenth birthday, actually."

Beca looked at her, "What did you do?"

"I kept my mouth shut. For a while, at least. But I was fifteen, I needed to tell someone. Eventually, I told my high school best friend what had happened and, well, things ended up getting out of hand. A week later everyone knew. Including Dad," Chloe gulped as the fight between her parents echoed through her mind clear as day.

"At least they didn't divorce? Um, that's, that's gotta count for something. Right?" Beca hesitantly asked.

Chloe nodded. "They almost did, though. Dad even moved out at one point for a few months. There was…a lot of fighting during my sophomore year."

"How come I didn't know about any of this, Chlo?" Beca asked her best friend. It wasn't like Chloe to keep anything from her. Even things that she could have gone a lifetime without knowing, like what tunes the older girl used to masturbate to. Her _lady jams_.

The ginger simply shrugged. "It hurts to talk about it. We drifted apart after that, and Mom blamed me for nearly destroying our family."

Beca couldn't help but shed a few tears as she looked at Chloe's hurt face. The girl looked like she was two seconds away from breaking and as much as Beca had grown and opened up with the Bellas since joining, she still couldn't stomach the sight of someone crying in front of her, let alone Chloe Beale. The puffy face, the tears that fell to her shirt, the wrinkle of her nose, it was a hauntingly tragic sight that Beca wasn't prepared to do anything about so early in the morning. Should she even be trying to bring these things back up? Maybe they were better left in the past. Beca had absolutely no idea, and she silently cursed herself for her social awkwardness.

"Why don't we eat this food before it gets cold?" The brunette desperately tried to deflect.

"We?" Chloe questioned, with a rather large smirk spread across her face.

"There's too much food here, Chlo, and you know it," was the simple answer that Beca spat back, as she dug into her first bite of the omlette.

"Oh really. Tell me, who was it that ate three McDoubles after practice two months ago?"

A blush quickly rose in Beca's cheeks.

"I did," she shyly admitted in between bites.

"And who was it that conquered the "Big As Yo Face Burrito Challenge" at Chuy's after we won nationals the first time?"

"That was only because I didn't want to lose to Fat Amy," Beca explained with a grunt.

"And who is it that gets moody whenever I so much as _try_ to steal a single french fry?" Chloe finished, making her point.

"Dude, I ask you every single time if you want me to get you some. It is not my fault that you say no and I attack when you try to steal my food as soon as I sit down." Beca's face was tomato red at this point, and she was worried that she would melt in a sea of humiliation.

Satisfied that she had won, Chloe finally backed off.

"Just eat what I made you. We'll never get to Miami if we have to stop every 2 hours to feed your abnormally large stomach."

Beca folded her arms at that. "Fat Amy is the only reason we can't just fly there. It's been nearly 4 months and the TSA still hasn't cleared us off the no-fly list."

Chloe chuckled as the memories came flooding back to her. The Bellas always did manage to keep things interesting.

"I still can't believe we almost got arrested."

"The bright side is that they tased Bumper after they thought he had a bomb, am I right?" Beca giggled with no shame in her voice. He might have changed for the better after getting together with Fat Amy, but karma was still owed to the ex-Treblemaker, especially after all the hi jinks and problems he had caused their group.

"Leave it to you to find a silver lining in an incident that almost got us all thrown in Guantanamo Bay."

"Don't be such a drama queen, Captain."

"It could've happened!," Chloe tried her best to put on a serious face.

"We're a bunch of college girls who were traveling to an acapella competition. No one was going to Gitmo."

"You don't know that."

"Chloe," Beca simply said, with a voice as stern as a five foot two girl could muster.

Chloe sighed. "Okay, fine. But it was still scary when we got manhandled off of the plane by big guys with badges."

Beca waved off her friend's silly attempt to turn a funny and memorable incident into a soap opera. "As awesome as the trip down memory lane has been, Chlo, I think I'll take a shower now if you ever want us to leave for Casa De Beale."

Chloe looked down at the plate of food she had brought Beca, and her jaw dropped at the empty dish that now sat beside her.

"I brought that to you like five minutes ago!" She exclaimed.

A sheepish smile formed, despite Beca's best efforts.

"I was hungry. Back off."

"Hurry up, I want to be out of here in an hour, Beca." Chloe asserted, as she got off the bed and left the room with a melodramatic slam of the door.

"Why did I think this would be a good idea?" Beca muttered under her breath, as she got up and stripped out of her pajamas.

The small girl knew the answer, of course. She had broken up with Jesse a few weeks ago, just as their sophomore year was coming to an end. She loved him, a lot if she was being honest with herself, but as she looked back at their relationship, Beca knew with a saddening clarity, that she had never actually been in love with the boy. He was kind, loving, and sweet to Beca, everything that a boyfriend should have been, but in the end Beca thought of him as nothing more than a brother; Her confidant that she would run to when the Bellas, school, or family was just too much to handle, and she simply needed someone to talk to.

Add the idea of spending time with her father and the step-monster, which would surely involve a long conversation questioning why she was still 'pushing people away,' and Beca was more than glad to agree to anything that got her a few weeks of peace of mind to think things over. Even if it meant being surrounded by a bunch of Beales, which Beca could only laugh at, as she tried to imagine a family of crazy, overly bubbly redheads.

Beca looked at her reflection in the mirror, as she walked into the bathroom.

"Looking good Mitchell," she complimented herself, with a provocative wink, in a silly attempt at self motivation that some self help guru on YouTube had suggested a week ago. Beca grabbed her towel from the rack and turned on the shower, stepping inside and closing the glass door a minute later. As Beca applied shampoo to her scalp, she couldn't help but sing. The latest song by Rachel Platten, _Fight Song_ , came to mind, since she had heard it on the radio at least a hundred times in the past week alone.

 _This is my fight song_

 _Take back my life song_

 _Prove I'm alright song_

 _My power's turned on_

 _Starting right now I'll be strong_

 _I'll play my fight song_

 _And I don't really care if nobody else believes_

 _'Cause I've still got a lot of fight left in me_

A second voice had finished the last line of the hit song, and all at once Beca's eyes flew wide open.

"Dude!" The girl screamed, as she spotted a nonchalant Chloe putting on makeup in her bathroom.

"What?" Chloe turned to look at her friend as if she was used to barging in on a naked Beca.

"Get. Out. Now," Beca exaggerated each word violently, while quickly getting out the last of the shampoo and covering herself with a towel as soon as she turned the water off.

Chloe glared at Beca for a moment and continued fixing her face.

"Nothing I haven't seen before," she mentioned, with a classic Beale wink.

"That doesn't make it any less inappropriate than the first time you did this to me, Red."

"You should be more confident with your body, Beca," Chloe suggested, as she applied some mascara and went about gathering the makeup from the counter.

"If you want me to come with you, and we both know you do Chloe, you'll leave so that I can get changed without having to put up with your wandering eyes," Beca challenged.

A staring contest ensued between the two girls, which Beca easily won, when Chloe burst out into a giggle just a few seconds later.

"You're so easily flustered," she said, and she gave Beca a kiss on the cheek. The redhead grinned, clearly proud of herself, when blood rushed to Beca's face, and a large blush washed over her.

"I'll be downstairs in 10!" Beca shouted, as Chloe exited the DJ's room. Alone again with her own thoughts, Beca couldn't help but smirk for some reason that she couldn't quite grasp. If she was being honest with herself, it was nice having someone who was so comfortable with her. It was new and uncharted territory for the loner, and she had to admit that having friends for a change was wonderful. Having a best friend was wonderful. Having Chloe was wonderful.

She shoved her thoughts of Chloe to the side, and after she was satisfied with her eyeliner and make-up, Beca grabbed her bags, threw them over her back, and headed downstairs to find Chloe chatting with Fat Amy and Stacie.

"Don't you look dolled up, shorty? You looking to make a good impression on ginger's family?" Fat Amy teased.

"I always look like this," Beca countered, as she took a look at herself in the nearby mirror. Studying the woman that looked back at her, Beca quickly realized that she had indeed toned back her usual 'alternative' appearance. It hadn't even registered to her when she was applying products to her face just a few minutes ago, but sure enough, the Bellas caught it. Fat Amy was all too observant about everything that her co-leader roommate did.

"Nahhh BM, you're totally trying to make nice with her parents so you can get into Chloe's pants."

"Amy!" everyone at the table shouted at once.

Beca looked away from the group for a minute, while she waited for the crimson to flush out of her face.

"I could make you run laps all summer long, Fat Amy," Beca challenged, as she turned to look back at her friend.

"It's summer. The Bellas are done for the season. You have no power here."

An eyebrow was raised at this. "You should really read the fine print of the housing contract that you signed sometime, Patricia."

"Bhloe," the Australian coughed from the table she was sitting at with Stacie, as she watched the two girls interact with each other. Stacie snickered, while Chloe shot the pair daggers through her eyes.

"Will you please stop with the Bhloe crap? It's never going to happen you guys. We're **just** friends." Beca emphasized her point as she tried to convince the group. When she looked at the redhead next to her, Beca swore she saw her friend's face falter for a second. When she blinked, though, the signature megawatt smile of Chloe Beale was back in full swing.

"Let's just get out of here!" Chloe exclaimed, desperate to change the topic to anything else. She grabbed a few water bottles and an apple from the fridge. Beca was already standing outside the front door, and Chloe laughed at the completely impatient girl.

"Have fun," Stacie said with a wink as Chloe closed the refrigerator door.

"Go get your girl, Red. You've got an entire summer to show our midget why she should let you jump her bones," Fat Amy chimed in.

Chloe let out a large sigh and let her demeanour fall for a moment. Every Bella knew that she was smitten with the DJ. It was obvious to anyone who spent even five minutes around the pair. Obvious to everyone except Beca, that is.

"We're just friends. That's all we'll ever be, you two."

"Right. Sure. Friends," Fat Amy sarcastically responded.

"Are you coming, or should I go to your parent's house without you, Chloe?" Beca shouted from outside, effectively ending the awkward conversation Chloe was engaged in.

The redhead simply shook her head with a large smile and proceeded to exit the house.

"Miami, here we come!" Chloe eagerly cheered as she walked outside and caught up with Beca.

 **Author's Notes: Please review, favorite, and follow! It'll let me know that my writing is NOT complete garbage haha. I hope you enjoy this small beginning. It's just to set the groundwork up for the story. I love you guys, so much, and be sure to stay awesome. This is seriously the best ship of the best fandom that ever was #bechloeisreal**


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